Personalized service helps community bank stand out

In mid-March, the Consumer Bankers Association hosted CBA Live, an annual event focused on the retail banking industry. Here are some key moments from one live panel titled “Adapting to Today’s Customer: Products, Personalization, Impact.”.Speakers were:Todd Purcell, TD Bank, Cherry Hill, N.J., head of digital strategy;Jody Bhagat, Personetics, presidentNima Ghamsari, Blend, founder & CEO.Comments have been lightly edited for clarity.Bhagat: When I think about personalization, I think there’s somewhat of a fatigue. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about hyper personalization. It’s not just semantics, but we focus on tailored experiences. How are we developing tailored experiences for our bank customers to drive a level of engagement that goes beyond transactions? We’re seeing some openness from banks to say, okay, let’s invest more in this space and see if we can actually cross sell products with banner ads on the mobile app.Ghamsari: Because the technology landscape has changed so much in the last decade, there’s more data available now both internally and from third parties. There’s more real time processing capability. Blend rolled out a real personalized debt consolidation flow that shows debts and what the new payments will be on those debts if you consolidate as part of a new loan. Can you show customers something that’s going to leave more money in their bank account? I think that’s so powerful. Blend takes what used to be an application for, say, a home equity loan and tailors it. Within the first couple screens you’ll see your house, how much equity you have in your house, your credit, your income and how much money you can be lent at this rate. And that’s just a couple screens.Purcell: A lot of conversation [about personalization] revolves around relevancy. How do you preserve timeliness? Oftentimes product offers are stale; it’s too late. So how do you think about solving that? The reason I share that is when TD Bank rolled out a [personalization] product, it took a while because so much technology was coming together. People like to see those personalized offers, but customers want them to look like and feel like they know where they are at.Ghamsari: I think about what personalization really is: it’s ‘here’s the financial outcome for you’. That’s a fundamentally different conversation. Everyone in this room is starting to serve unmet needs, whether it’s a super high interest loan that a customer wants to consolidate or mortgage rates, which customers may not be following. Most consumers aren’t sitting there looking at their finances in detail, so that’s why our job in the industry is to make sure we’re meeting unmet needs before customers even have them.Bhagat: This is such an exciting period for bankers. Bankers can now see a customer just spent $2,500 at Home Depot, and are probably in a home improvement cycle because it’s much more than they usually spend. That’s real customer intelligence not derived from a marketing list or that’s modeled, but something that’s actually in the customer data. So that’s where the role of the banker and the way that they can empathize with the customer is unique. Do you think as an industry we have the opportunity to delight? Where can we delight that customer in that moment where they’re engaging with us beyond transactions, beyond the commodity service that they expect? Arguably we should all be at a level of delivering that core experience. There are things that a bank can do to help put more money in your customers’ pockets every single month.Ghamsari: I love the challenge of providing an empathetic conversation; to be more human in those interactions. We don’t have all the answers to this yet, but it is a high bar to ask how do you deliver that unexpectedly human interaction digitally? There’s currently an obsession with fewer fields or five minutes or less on a mobile phone. We have got to get fast, frictionless and give customers a guided journey, but let them choose their own path. Some customers, especially younger demographics, may need more guidance. And so we’re actually trying to flip the script on its head to say maybe it’s not just the speed of response time and application, but really is a human in the middle of that conversation when the customer needs guidance.We think technology is a way to understand unique customer needs, different stages of their life and different demographics.